Public Broadcasting: Your Taxes Fund Liberal Bias

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting
Act of 1967, the bill included language insisting that fairness
and objectivity should be observed in “all programming of a
controversial nature.” These words were routinely ignored on PBS
television broadcasts and NPR news programming. In 1992, Congress
toughened that language, and public broadcasters still ignored it. How have PBS and NPR displayed a liberal tilt over the years? How
have they dealt with challenges to their taxpayer funding? Take a
look at MRC’s archive of articles for examples:

Exhibit A of a liberal bias at PBS is still the program Now,
first hosted by Bill Moyers, and now by David Brancaccio. On
Friday night, the blatantly partisan ghost of Moyers was still
hanging over the broadcast in an attack on House Majority Leader
Tom DeLay.

From the sound of the New York Times front page on May 2, they must have been waving smelling salts in the face of liberal reporters. CPB’s chairman was getting serious about
assessing accuracy and fairness on PBS.

Liberal lobbyists inside and outside PBS, including the New York Times editorial
page, are once again trying to convince the Congress to allow
them to create a massive $5 billion endowment so they may achieve
"financial independence."

Bill Moyers ended his tenure at the show Now
by raging against harsh attacks on conservative talk radio. But no one has heaped more invective, waved more bloody shirts, and uncorked more pure propaganda than Moyers in the last three years on his
weekly PBS drone-fest.

PBS
omnipresence Bill Moyers told the AP that he would end his show by
uncovering the major story of our time, the media's conservative
bias: “We have an ideological press that's interested in the
election of Republicans, and a mainstream press that's interested
in the bottom line.”

Selected to moderate the vice-presidential candidate debate, PBS Washington Week
host Gwen Ifill has boldly declared that Republicans conduct
“procedural assassinations,” that campaign “reform” opponents are
like terrorists, and the Starr Report is like a “truck bomb.”

PBS anchorman Jim Lehrer did not have a promising record as a
moderator. In the 2000 debates, Lehrer asked about the need to
end racial profiling and for greater control of gun sales, but he
found no time to challenge the two candidates from a conservative direction on the divisive effects of racial quotas or the
failures of gun control, for example.

NPR received a $200 million contribution from the estate of
liberal McDonald’s heiress Joan Kroc. She must have felt that
putting her money on All Things Considered and Morning Edition and Talk of the Nation was in line with the rest of her political giving.

Stephen F. Hayes reported that Moyers is doing something no
commercial network would allow. He’s both the taxpayer-supported
network’s most prominent prime-time journalist, and he moonlights
as the President of the Florence and John Schumann Foundation.

Scouts' Honor didn't need to have words beeped out, and it didn't get graphic
about gay sex. But it was a remarkable salute to Steven Cozza, a
16-year-old kid whose idea of fun is demeaning the Boy Scouts of
America at gay pride rallies.

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers produced a documentary slamming the chemical industry entitled Trade Secrets.
They said his complete omission of industry supporters from the
documentary was "journalistic malpractice." Moyers said their complaints were “a badge of honor."

If the 15 questions that Lehrer chose are in any way indicative of mainstream political opinion, the "uncommitted" voters are stuck
between voting for Gore...or Ralph Nader. Eight of them may as
well have been Gore campaign press releases.

On the PBS female-pundit show To The Contrary,
host Bonnie Erbe insulted conservative Linda Chavez on her need
for a gun to defend herself: "you have a greater chance of being
struck by lightning, Linda, than living where you live, and at
your age, being raped. Sorry.

PBS anchor and moderator Jim Lehrer reported the questioners
were "voters who were identified as being uncommitted by the
Gallup organization." Lehrer chose which of the more than 100
people would ask questions. Only one asked a conservative
question.

The media touted the fairness of PBS anchor Jim Lehrer. He does
have a "quiet, self-effacing style," as NBC reported. He is not
Bryant Gumbel. But his journalism has historically followed the
liberal pack.

Reporter Frank Greve discovered that PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers is
the Scaife counterpart of the vast left-wing "campaign finance
reform" conspiracy, earning $200,000 a year as president of the
Florence and John Schumann Foundation, a major funder of campaign
“reform” groups.

A magazine reported "the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
acknowledged late Wednesday that CPB and PBS executives provided
inaccurate testimony to a congressional panel,” claiming that
they swapped direct-mail lists with Republicans. But the swaps
were only with Democrats.

MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Telecommunications,
Trade, and Consumer Protection on the direct-mail list swaps
between PBS stations and the Democratic National Committee.

For five years, PBS stations were direct-mail list-swapping
with the Democratic National Committee. Not only do Republicans
surrender their tax dollars to get defamed by liberal programs,
stations like WGBH take their tax dollars and helps the Democrats
with their direct-mail fundraising.

Bill Moyers returned to PBS after a long absence for the latest liberal installment on October 6, titled "Washington’s Other Scandal."
Frontline apparently couldn’t stand the thought of devoting
an hour to a President lying to Congress, a grand jury, and the
entire public, since it was "just about sex.” It was another
sermon for campaign finance “reform.”

PBS’s The American Experience
remembered Ronald Reagan for winning the Cold War, but without
noting the war PBS waged on the Reagan foreign policy, including
live coverage of the Iran-Contra hearings. Its domestic-policy
minutes contained the same old liberal slurs.

Garrison Keillor, the star of public radio’s Prairie Home Companion,
was mad that PBS failed to be leftist enough. He would just as
soon pull the plug on public TV altogether: "I don't think
there's any reason for public television to exist anymore, I honestly don't.

Instead of live coverage of congressional hearings into illegal fundraising, the PBS show Washington Week in Review
devoted parts of four shows to an analysis of campaign funding.
But instead of focusing on law-breaking, host Ken Bode promoted
campaign finance "reform."

The makers of the PBS show Barney & Friends
sued the “San Diego Chicken” for copyright infringement. Barney
the dinosaur was the third richest entertainer on the Forbes list
in 1994. What's gone utterly forgotten in this story is that
taxpayers paid millions to start Barney off.

PBS cleared the decks for live coverage of the Watergate hearings, the Iran-Contra hearings, and the NPR-prodded kangaroo court known as
the Hill-Thomas hearings. But in the Clinton years, only four to
six percent of PBS stations covered Whitewater or Waco hearings,
and PBS passed on the Senate hearings into illegal Democratic
fundraising from foreign donors.

National
Public Radio hasn't shrunk from presenting itself as the scourge
of corporate bigotry, but this champion of the onerous
anti-discrimination regimes was pecked by the chickens coming
home to roost. NPR has been sued for race discrimination and
sexual harassment.

James Fallows' book Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine Democracy led a new, liberal attack on the media: too wealthy, too distant from the common people, too conservative. So Frontline aired a Fallows-boosting documentary titled "Why Americans Hate the Press.”

Frontline’s documentary
on the presidential choice showed Bob Dole as the dark figure
from the harsh plains of Kansas whose mentor was...Richard Nixon.
Clinton, by contrast, was the seductive charmer from the gentle
terrain of Arkansas, who was like a Baptist minister.

PBS funded -- without any rebuttal -- Hedrick Smith's four-hour documentary on how Washington works, The People and the Power Game,
which devoted the first hour to his claim that Bill Clinton has
been abused by the media, while Newt Gingrich employed “extremist
polemics.”

Three months after a dramatic conservative electoral wave, PBS's Frontline
focused on how President Clinton had failed to be liberal enough in
three areas: gays in the military, campaign finance reform, and
government "investments" in job training.

MRC analysts reviewed every new Frontline broadcast
during the last three seasons (72 programs) and found
conservative arguments and experts were completely ignored in
eight programs on race relations and seven shows on the
environment.

As PBS anchor Judy Woodruff pounded Barbara Bush about uncivil comments
made about Bill Clinton just before the GOP convention, the
First Lady took Woodruff to task: "Look, you're saying nothing
nice ... where were you during the Democrat convention defending
us?

At
a PBS press tour, Moyers claimed conservatives have offered "no substantive analysis of my work that would confirm their desire to label me, as I think he [David Horowitz] said yesterday, 'a left-wing Democrat.'"

Newsweek and The New Republic debunked the Frontline
claims of a 1980 Reagan-campaign conspiracy to delay the release
of American hostages in Iran for political gain. (Scroll down
for PBS/NPR coverage of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings.)

Speaking at a Democratic Issues Conference, PBS omnipresence Bill
Moyers declared his heart still pounds for the Donkey Party:
"Down there in Texas I was raised on mother's milk and Roosevelt
speeches and over the years I still cherish the party's defining
stands."

The ten-part PBS series Race to Save the Planet
urged viewers to support an "environmental revolution" of
drastic government measures or face "enormous calamities in a
very short time." When asked why an opposing view was not
included, a producer declared, "There are ways of confusing the
public in putting ping-pong matches onto television which we did not particularly think was useful."

After two years of dismissal, PBS aired the anti-communist documentary Nobody Listened, when it could be balanced by Saul Landau's film The Uncompromising Revolution.
Landau lauded Castro: "Fidel touched this young machine adjuster
and the man enjoyed a mild ecstasy. I know the feeling."

Harper's Editor Lewis Lapham was awarded a six-part series loaded with
liberals (five times as many liberals as conservatives), and
sulfurous in its attacks on American imperialism. In supporting
the Contras, President Reagan "sold out his oath of office and
subverted the Constitution."

In a PBS series titled The Struggle for Democracy,
Canadian journalist Patrick Watson claimed that "compared with
some African horror stories, Zimbabwe has to be a democratic success, despite the one-party state."

While PBS aired plenty of liberal fare, films with a different point a view were spurned. The Other Europe by Jacques Rupnik and Soviets at the Crossroads were apparently insufficiently optimistic about the Soviet Union. But old Moyers specials were recycled.

The PBS documentary series Frontline laid out the lawsuit of the leftist Christic Institute charging a
"Secret Team" of CIA operatives tried to assassinate a leader of
the Nicaragua Contra freedom fighters, with special attention to
the conspiracy theories of a liberal Senator named John Kerry.

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers complained about the growing
conservatism of the Southern Baptist Convention, but praised the
communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua as "a movement that is fueled
with Christian passion and Christian commitment."